A DEA Benchmarking Methodology for New Product Development Process Optimization Amy J.C. Trappey a , Tzu-An Chiang a, b, 1 , Wen-Chih Chen c , Jen-Yau Kuo d , Chia-Wei Yu d a Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, National Tsing Hua University, Taiwan. b Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, Mingchi University of Technology, Taiwan. c Department of Industrial Engineering and Management, National Chiao Tung University, Taiwan. d RFID Technology Center, Industrial Technology Research Institute, Taiwan. Abstract. Developing new products on time within budget constraints is a crucial issue to survive in today’s competitive marketplace. However, unpredictable incidents occur during new product development (NPD) processes, which often cause expenses, resources and schedule overruns. Traditional project management tools lack of efficient and effective methods to solve these problems and challenges. Hence, this study applies the data envelopment analysis (DEA) concept to develop a novel project planning and management decision support methodology for NPD that can optimally allocate resources and dynamically response to unexpected delays and budget overruns. The research adopts the methodology to a mobile phone NPD project case to demonstrate the method’s real-world application and illustrate the effectiveness of the proposed methodology in-depth. Keywords. New product development, DEA, resources and schedule overruns 1 Introduction Introducing new products on time within resource and budget constraints is a key to success in today’s competitive market place. Thus, distributed and collaborative product development paradigms are emerged considering time-to- market and cost efficiency for the complexity of modern product design. However, unpredictable incidents usually occur during new product development (NPD) processes, which cause expenses, resources and schedule overruns. Conventional project planning methods, estimating time, budgets and resources of NPD activities, 1 Department of Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, National Tsing Hua University, 101, Sec. 2 Kuang Fu Road, Hsinchu, Taiwan 300, R.O.C.; Tel: +886 (2) 2908 9899; Fax: +886 (2) 2904 1914 ; Email: tachiang@mail.mit.edu.tw